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I don't want or need my UI to pretend it's a Nordic modern art museum. Seeing all that screen space wasted on huge margins, drop shadows, and glow effects makes

I don't want or need my UI to pretend it's a Nordic modern art museum. Seeing all that screen space wasted on huge margins, drop shadows, and glow effects makes me want to cry. I would rather see more of the information I frequently need, or the controls I frequently use, without having to dig through page stacks and submenus to find them. In cases where there isn't any more commonly-used stuff to display, I'd rather have text that can be easily read without squinting/glasses/giant phone screen, and controls that can be easily operated while riding in a vehicle.

core-questions 7y ago
This is why every actually-productive program ends up looking "ugly" - think Blender or any other 3D tool, or Emacs, or a well fleshed-out IDE, or a professional engineering tool. The screen is cluttered with dialogues and toolboxes, many of which can be customized and rearranged into precisely the tool you have in mind. Consider, for example, that Word 6 for Windows 3.1 let you do more to customize toolbars and menus than the latest Office 365 does inside the browser. The market was for a professional, to some extent, before; Microsoft Works was the dumbed-down version for more casual needs. Now, it seems like that professional set of functionality is an afterthought for a lot of UX designers. Then again, you only really need pro UX when your goal is to actually get your product working well for people that aren't good at discovering interfaces themselves. If your target market is used to hammering their way through ugly UIs and CLIs out of necessity, pro UX focused on the 99% might not be the best investment; being consistent in your choices to at least make results predictable is probably the best lesson to apply in its stead.